Lovely Package

Curating the very best packaging design

“In the XIII century, the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered a sequence of numbers with a particular feature: each numbers is the sum of the previous two. The sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc) appears many times in nature, describing a wide number of biological settings: branching in trees, arrangement of leaves in a stem, the flowering of artichoke, the spiral of shells, the seeds on a sunflower. It is also widely used in design, geometry, architecture, computation, art.”

“Spinefrasse is a young group of wine-makers in the Colli Euganei area near Padua, north-east Italy: their aim is to produce the typical wines of their land joining both the old tradition of wine-making (hand harvesting, low production, selection of grapes, limited editions) and the new techniques and technology in wine production and selling.”

The design of this packaging is inspired by this double feature: it joins a mathematic description of nature and beauty (the Fibonacci sequence) with a fresh design and a modern look. The same contradiction is found in the paper (Fedrigoni Rustique, a natural and rough paper) on which a die-cut and an embossing give an elegant and modern touch. And in the brand itself, which remembers a vintage heraldry revised in a contemporary look.

Being produced only in small quantities, all the bottles are numbered: each bottle becomes a single-year limited edition. New wines will be added in the next years, adding numbers to the sequence.”

Comments

I’m a fan of the Fibonacci sequence. There’s nothing visually apparent about this design that makes that connection for me.

That being said, I like the design. It has a clinical, almost medicinal characteristic to it that creates a “wine cures what ails you” message. The attention to production details are superb. Bottom line. I’d buy it.

I had the precise intention not to use a visual strongly connected to the sequence: I could use the spiral or the golden ratio, but I was afraid the project would lose its cleanness and its apparent cheap-letterpress-style.

On the other hand, I had the urge to publish the work long before a wider selection of wines comes out: in the next years, the client is adding new wines (and numbers, of course) to the sequence. Probably, with four or five bottles the Fibonacci-thing will come out stronger